Book: LabWindows/CVI Programming for Beginners

Question

Has anyone read the followong book LabWindows/CVI Programming for Beginners LabWby Shahid F. Khalid ?
This book in not in print anymore and  inpossible to find.
Does anyone know of any similar source material?
I have both LabWindows/CVI Basics I&II but the content is extremely limited and not enogh details.
Does NI offer anything better than the embedded Help?
A Programmers Reference would be nice.
Thanks.

Answer 1

Hello NI Nubie,
I have that book, and also its "advanced" sequel by the same author.  They both went out of print a long time ago.  The books are OK, but they are only available on the secondary market for ridiculous prices now, and that is assuming that you can even find them.
If I could pass on some advice that might be more helpful to you in learning CVI: pretend those books do not exist for now.  Instead, I think that for learning CVI, there is nothing better than looking at other people's CVI project-level code and really understanding it, inside and out, and then making your own modifications to it to enforce what you just learned from it.  There are several places to start looking for project-level CVI code, which I will list in (what I think) are the highest-to-lowest priority of your training.
The first place I recommend is the examples that ship with CVI (located in the "samples" directory under the CVI installation directory).  I say this because these are supported by the NI developers and support crew.  In fact, back in 1995 when I was learning CVI 3.1, I dove into the "Icon Editor" application, for several reasons: it was a *complete* application (as opposed to the other, mostly point-solution "academic" examples under the samples directory), it showed how to segment your code into multiple source and header files, and it showed many advanced user interface features (menus, cut-and-paste).  There is now an "example finder" to help locate examples that "fit" to what you are currently trying to accomplish.  I also use the freeware "grep-like" tool called "Agent Ransack" (URL is below) to hunt down specific CVI functions and identifiers (such as certain EVENTS and how these examples use them).
Agent Ransack on MythicSoft.com
The second place I recommend is the other "support" locations on the NI web site.  There are knowledgebase articles, tutorials, submitted examples, community examples, and also extra "academic" examples from NI engineers that aren't the same as the ones that ship with CVI.  There are also whitepapers scattered in there as well, and a few that have hidden sample code that is embedded at the bottom of the article.  You really have to hunt for this stuff, and it would be great if the NI folks could try to index this a bit better somehow.  I sometimes even resort to using Google's search engine to find them on the NI web site, because the NI search engine may not find them.
The third place I recommend are user-based web sites created by power-users of CVI who like to share their code.  Two that I found long ago that remain at the top of the list (in my opinion).  One is Guillaume Dargaud's site, where he has lots of CVI examples and freeware.  The other is Philippe Baucour's "Rebel" CVI site (but you will need to use an online translator if you don't speak French, though).
Guillaume Dargaud's web site (drill down for CVI examples and freeware)
Philippe Baucour's "Rebel" CVI web site
Finally, you might find it interesting to know that there is a tremendous repository of C source code scattered all around the Internet, mostly as part of free and open-source software projects, many of which are supported on sites such as SourceForge.net, and many other locations.  Many of these places are filled with people (in forums or mailing list servers) who live in the C programming world on a full-time basis, and can help you through some of the advanced techniques.  Some of these projects might be targeted to Windows, some use cross-platform techniques, so they have a chance of being applied to your CVI efforts.  There is also an entire universe of programming "libraries" and capabilities that you can use to augment your CVI projects as well.  All of this because of the open-source revolution, riding on the back of GNU/Linux and the community and corporate entities that are backing it all.  Examples that come to mind are Cygwin and MinGW.  If you only have the time to just look up these two items on Wikipedia, you will see that this is just the tip of the iceberg of the possibilities that are available to you as a C and CVI programmer on Windows.
I hope this was helpful to you.
JB
To whom it may concern: My alias is also my nickname, I've had it since I was a (very) skinny basketball-playing teen. OK, so I've got a 38 inch waist now, but my hometown friends haven't shaken that appellation for me. I trust that you will someday be OK with that alias, as I have been with that nickname.